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S+I Board Reshuffle Jamberoo Extreme Plus 2.0 :: The Revenge of the S+I board
S+I board is really fuck right now I mean look at this thread huh I bet you forgot about that one already - even though hampa said he was gonna do it like who even knows?? In a nutshell: S+I board needs a rework.

Why:

Jamming all 2 billion ideas into one board is really sub-optimal because it hides a ton of decent information and makes the board tiresome to read through at best - for users and more importantly for devs and staff.

Furthermore, a cleaner system promotes communication and transparency - you can see what has been ignored, if devs are seeing what you're suggesting, whether the relevant staff are actually discussing your ideas for so-and-so board. Rather than SkulFuk appearing and saying 'yeah sounds good' followed by potential radio silence, clearer and more organised communication/action will be observable by everyone involved. Did you guys even know gynx is our community manager? Because he's not that was a myth


How:

S+I becomes its own section (like Clans or Market). Within this section, we get three boards:
  • Game Dev
  • Site Dev
  • Community
Each board has an 'Approved' subforum.

People post ideas in the relevant board, and when an idea is approved for development it is moved from the board into the board's Approved subforum and tagged:
  • [Pending]
  • [InDev]
  • [Implemented] -- should be closed also

I think this is healthier than simple post tagging because things which are pending/indev won't suspiciously disappear off the first page to never be seen again - the lifetime of a suggestion will be far more apparent.
Last edited by Fear; Oct 9, 2016 at 07:07 PM.
Originally Posted by suomynona View Post
I prefer the option with that results in the least boards, because we already have a LOT of boards. I'm also of the opinion that having all of the suggestions available in a single board means that opportunity glances might result in a dev who wouldn't ordinarily have looked at a suggestion saying "Hrm, that might actually be neat, can I make it happen?"

Boards are a lot more complicated than tags, and I don't believe automated tagging is particularly necessary. Anything that's going to get a mod tag should be getting the at least 5 minutes of attention it deserves anyways, and what does another 30 seconds of clicking really mean in that case?

No, I think that's the weakest response in this thread so far. S+I board is pretty abysmal and the only reason more people aren't complaining is because it's been abysmal for maybe years now and they've given up on any change happening (is that ironic?).

More boards being bad is subjective as all hell and I don't think its a concern that even entered the head of anybody ever. I hope this doesn't come across as aggressive or rude but I really hate your reasoning. Your first point clearly doesn't work at all - dev/community reform work is almost nonexistent and the way things are currently is proven to be not helping. Would a rework of S+I help? I don't know, nobody can know that, but what is evident is that what we currently have is shoddy and would be just as effective if it was removed entirely.

You're even against the auto-tagging? Something that would let devs sift through filler and find the areas they want to work on is a bad idea? For example Lite is currently doing a lot of work on clans, and shev is focusing mostly on the torishop features. There are no devs right now who are so ridiculously active to be taking on several projects at once, and unfocused dev time is bad enough even if it were possible.

I really can't see where your stance on this is founded.
More boards being bad is not nearly as subjective as you might think. If we could fit every board onto one page without dropping useful information such as the most recent posts in each, I would do so in a heartbeat. The issue becomes organization: If we make this board subboard based, then people have to look to figure out where their suggestion goes, people have to make sure the rules are actually the same in each board (which over time it might turn out that they wouldn't be), people have to worry about whether or not they're actually posting in the right subboard, and the people in charge of talking to the developers have to be looking in the right place to get relevant suggestions.

By "no automated tagging" what I mean is that I don't want to waste developer time on solving a stupidly hard problem of figuring how to make threads have correct and up to date tags in this forum all the time. I did not mean that threads would lack tags, or that it would be possible to post threads that didn't have tags: I meant that the user would have to choose an appropriate tag and that if a thread was brought to the point where a mod tag would benefit it (which is not extremely common) the tag would have to be added manually by the moderators. This is not a particularly huge use of time (about 30 seconds, assuming your internet is kinda slow and the forums are being a bit slow). This is also not a place where I would trust an automated system, because it is a job that a moderator can do much better with much less training and not wasting weeks to months of developer time replicating something that essentially only Google has ever gotten right.

To clarify: Users will be REQUIRED to choose a tag when posting. It will be against the rules to choose an invalid tag. This is the level of automated tagging I am proposing.

Considering that this tagging system would allow people to automatically filter these suggestions in exactly the same fashion that having the subboards would, while also allowing all suggestions to be viewed simultaneously, to be automatically sorted by whether or not they were already forwarded to the developers, to automatically find suggestions that have been marked as implemented, or to historically find suggestions that have been marked as [Will Not Be Implemented] for the sake of avoiding wasting our time -WITHOUT- cluttering the board structure, without making the forum's navigation structure even more hellish to navigate, without making an additional caveat that the search function has to be able to identify its way around for the actually small handful of people who use the official search, and all in a fashion that can be updated to include additional categories whenever we want, I feel this tagging system is more reasonable than adding additional boards.

Edit:
Another particular advantage is that if a dev wants us to formally add a specific tag type, e.g. [Clan] or [ToriShop], we can do so. We can do so in 5 minutes with essentially no chance of fucking up permissions, of moving threads to the wrong place, or of making the system in any way more complicated or easier to break in the future.
Last edited by suomynona; Oct 13, 2016 at 09:22 AM.
Squad Squad Squad lead?
The standardization of Toribash Squad roles may have gone too far!
Originally Posted by suomynona View Post
To clarify: Users will be REQUIRED to choose a tag when posting. It will be against the rules to choose an invalid tag. This is the level of automated tagging I am proposing.

Edit:
Another particular advantage is that if a dev wants us to formally add a specific tag type, e.g. [Clan] or [ToriShop], we can do so. We can do so in 5 minutes with essentially no chance of fucking up permissions, of moving threads to the wrong place, or of making the system in any way more complicated or easier to break in the future.

Regardless of anything else, I think this should be implemented for now. I'm gonna ask shev to tell us his opinion as a dev, which is probably the opinion that actually matters in all of this. Obviously your experience managing the community is important too, and your concerns about the subboards make a lot of sense.
Last edited by Fear; Oct 13, 2016 at 01:26 PM.
I would be down for anything that makes S&I board more systematic with the least amount of effort. As of now, the best way of doing that seems to be through categorizing with tags.

I like the idea of tags, and I would rather make tag labels general than specific. Totally agree that tags should be mandatory. Automation is not needed here, and, once again, it aligns well with least effort approach.
Let's go with this tagging system for now and see how it goes.
Squad Squad Squad lead?
The standardization of Toribash Squad roles may have gone too far!
So there's no tag that tells the community if an idea is actually being worked on. All we know is that devs are aware of it ([Elevated]) and whether the it's been implemented or won't be ([Implemented]/[Will Not Be Implemented]). That's a pretty big thing to leave out so I asked suo.

irc


So I clearly don't think there's a valid reason as to why we're missing an [In-Dev] tag, and I really don't think we're asking for too much.

Whatchu think, community?
-------
Also [Event] tag is kinda redundant since it events fit snugly within the realm of the [Community] tag, dontcha think? No need to make some inane distinction.
Last edited by Ele; Oct 14, 2016 at 06:55 AM.
[Community] things are generally going to be tagged as things that represent overarching decisions. This usually involves lots of arguing and "but traditionally we've not let people have 2 letter long names in wingdings" sorts of things.

[Event] things are generally going to be things that a couple of bored Event Squad people could make happen overnight if they wanted to. They might be more complicated, but ES will almost definitely be involved

Very different target audience, so different tags.
Last edited by suomynona; Oct 14, 2016 at 07:23 AM.
Squad Squad Squad lead?
The standardization of Toribash Squad roles may have gone too far!
Still don't think it's necessary (also some events require big staff discussion and planning). Events directly impact and involve the community - They're for the community.

It's like you're over-classifying the descriptor tags and under-classifying the development tags (by omitting the In-Dev tag). It feels like a superficial change and our concerns about transparency are being ignored atm.
I'm classifying the descriptor tags based on what I imagine will get the most ideas to the right people as quickly as possible. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I feel like "This needs to go through admins first" and "This needs to go through Event Squad first" is a valid, important distinction.

As for the [In Development] tag, it's being discussed at the moment.

Edit:
Originally Posted by IRC
<shev> I feel like there is a gap between elevated and implemented
<shev> but at the same time people expect everything that's "in development" to be eventually implemented
<suomynona> yeah
<suomynona> and sometimes that's just not the best option for everyone
<shev> let's keep it general for now and see how this version of S&I works

Or, in short, no [In Development] tag at the moment because we're pretty sure people will see it as a promise that things will eventually be implemented, and that can't always be the case. However, our current agenda for transparency is to note that while there is a private board for developers specifically, most of the relevant development discussion (about implementation specifics and implementation status) can be held in the S&I threads for a suggestion. That is, in short, that we intend to be reasonable about providing updates and interaction opportunities in your threads. This is the case whether or not your thread is [Elevated], though [Elevated] threads have been acknowledged to be of fairly immediate interest.
Last edited by suomynona; Oct 14, 2016 at 08:37 AM.
Squad Squad Squad lead?
The standardization of Toribash Squad roles may have gone too far!